Silent House is a 2011 American horror film directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau (Open Water).
The plot focuses on a young woman who is terrorized in her family vacation home while cleaning up the property with her father and uncle.
It is a remake of the 2010 Uruguayan film La casa muda (The Silent House), which was allegedly based on an actual incident that occurred in a village in Uruguay in the 1940s.
Silent House was marketed for its taking place in real-time and was edited so as to appear as a single continuous shot, similar to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948).
Plot:
A young woman named Sarah is staying at a dilapidated Victorian house in the countryside with her father and her uncle, helping them fix it up. A lot of hammering and banging happens on and around a wall found to be infested with mould, and mould spore toxicity may be a rational explanation for subsequent happenings if one is needed.
Due to petty fighting between Sarah’s uncle and her father, her uncle decides to take a break from working and drives into town to get tools. While her father works upstairs, there is a knock on the door and Sarah answers it, meeting a young woman named Sophia who claims to be one of Sarah’s childhood friends, though Sarah does not remember her. The two plan to meet again later…
Reviews:
” …Olsen perfectly conveys the feeling of being trapped in a nightmare you can’t wake up from. In its best moments, that’s what Silent House feels like—a realistically-staged bad dream. The third act does, in fact, reveal a twist but since there’s so little going on, plot wise, you may have a pretty good idea where it’s going long before it gets there.” BlogCritics.org
Release:
Silent House premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2011 and was released in US theaters on March 9, 2012.
